To Ashes
by Maidenstear
Summary: The first time she met him, she thought he was fire.


Aneko: I'm such a bad writer. I'm writing another story while I have one in the works. BAD AUTHOR, BAD! Plot bunnies, why must you torture me so?

Disclaimer: I don't own Munto. Or Sora Wo Miageru Shoujo no Hitomi Utsuru Sekai. I wish it was longer (the show, not the title), and if I owned it I would _totally_ have extend it.

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**To Ashes**

When they first met, she thought he was fire. He was never still—a quick head turn, the rapid rise and fall of his chest as he breathed. Constant movement, the way a fire slides and dances.

And he _burned_. With just the calling of her name, or one look, she could feel the warmth that surged with just a little too much heat. He moved like a breath of flame, fast, predictable in his unpredictability. It both terrified and entranced her, so that she couldn't look away. His calls (more like _demands_ than humble requests) for her to join him, to follow him, pulled and repelled.

The first time she saw him, an encounter as swift and mysterious as a dream, left her weary. From those few spacious moments, his words, his gaze, his everything burned itself into her senses, leaving her raw and aching. Time flew by after the fact, but like a new blister, she still felt that itch, something impossible to ignore

She awaited their next meeting with fear and longing. She didn't have to wait long. Again, he appeared, with all the raging of flames in his eyes, her name a growl on his tongue. Like a vision, like a dream. Again, she pulled away from his burning, this foreign entity that commanded her attention.

But although her mind rejected the hand that was offered and the plea for help, head muddled by fear and confusion and worry, her heart whispered in a barely-heard voice. She was needed. She was needed. She was _needed._

Still, she said no. Not with words, but with a rejection of his existence.

But the third time, perhaps she was the one to call him forth. As she puzzled over her own abilities in the dark of night, he came.

"Don't close your eyes. Don't take your eyes off the future," he demanded in a voice that resonated.

He burned with the desperation for existence. The desperation of an entire world. But that was something she could only wonder at for the time.

"Running away won't solve anything."

She knew that. Of course she knew that. But right when she thought that maybe, just a little, she could help him, he vanished again, leaving her just as unbalanced as before.

When she saw him again, she wanted to be angry with him. She wanted to get him out of her life, for the visions to stop blowing up her world and separating her from her friends. But she couldn't tell him. Because the fire was dying.

Without fuel, fires will die and turn to ash. As she watched him, once bright and proud, now growing faint, his back bent, her words shriveled up. That fire, that inescapable burning was nothing but embers, and soon it would fall to ashes.

She shouldn't have felt anything for this virtual stranger who had invaded her life. Nothing at all.

But…

But.

But what?

She still doesn't know what made her reach for him. She stretched her hand, and stretched and stretched, until her bones cried out in agony. And she stretched some more, until she could feel it, the intensity that still rolled off of his skin.

Once, when she was little, she had burned her finger on the stove. She cried and cried at the uncomfortable heat, as her mother ran it under cold water and scolded her.

In the few moments before her vision wavered and they were thrown from that small connection and back to their separate worlds, his eyes captured her. She could feel it, flames licking at her fingers, her hair, singeing her dress, but she couldn't pull away.

She was his new fuel, the source of his burning so that he would not die out. And she would be his source until there was nothing left of her, and together, they would crumble to ash and be blown away. It should have terrified her, but all she felt was a rush of adrenaline that roared through her veins.

And then she thought that maybe she was also fire, burning too.

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Aneko: It makes more sense in my head, I know it's not the best. I apologize. If you like it, please review. I'm tired of finding nothing but "Favorite" notifications without a single comment. It's not to inflate my ego, I swear. It lets me know what people really like about my stories. So _please_. Review.


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